Sir William Flower (1831-1899), a distinguished zoologist and physical anthropologist, in 1885[74] adopted the old three-fold classification:—I. Ethiopian, Negroid, or Melanian. _A._ African or typical Negroes; _B._ Hottentots and Bushmen; _C._ Oceanic Negroes or Melanesians; _D._ Negritos. II. Mongolian or Xanthous. _A._ Eskimo; _B._ Typical Mongolian (including the Mongolo-Altaic and the Southern Mongolian groups); _C._ Malay; _D._ Brown Polynesians or Malayo-Polynesians; _E._ American Indians (excluding the Eskimo). III. Caucasian or “White.” _A._ Xanthochroi; _B._ Melanochroi. As Flower himself says, this scheme of classification, “in its broad outlines, scarcely differs from that proposed by Cuvier nearly sixty years ago.... Still it can only be looked upon as an approximation.” Although he places skin-colour first, he tacitly admits its insufficiency as a main diagnostic character, and his three groups coincide with a classification based on the nature of the hair. Footnote 74: _Journ. Anth. Inst._, xiv., pp. 378-393. [Sidenote: =Deniker.=] Among the later classifications a new tendency may be noted. The earlier schemes aimed at producing a series of water-tight compartments into which the races of the globe could be isolated. Further research, however, encouraged the growing conviction that a pure race is practically non-existent, and a different method had to be followed. This is described by Deniker (p. 284): “Taking into account all the new data of anthropological science, I endeavoured, as do the botanists, to form natural groups by combining the different characters (colour of the skin, nature of the hair, stature, form of the head, of the nose, etc.).” This results in the formation of seventeen ethnic groups, containing twenty-nine races, and these are ingeniously arranged (p. 289) in a two-dimensional grouping, to show their affinities, which is a modification of his suggestive earlier scheme.[75] Footnote 75: _Bull. Soc. d’Anth._, 1889. The “pigeon-hole” system of classification had, however, been discredited in the fourth edition of Prichard’s _Natural History of Man_, edited and enlarged by Edwin Norris (1855), since on p. 644 it is stated:— The different races of men are not distinguished from each other by strongly-marked, uniform, and permanent distinctions, as are the several species belonging to any given tribe of animals. All the diversities which exist are variable, and pass into each other by insensible gradations; and there is, moreover, scarcely an instance in which the actual transition cannot be proved to have taken place. This is practically the same result at which Waitz arrived in 1863. [Sidenote: =Keane.=]